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Evolution of the Earth Observation Market

The changing Earth Observation (EO) market has been a topic of office conversation this week at Pixalytics. Weâ€™re currently in the final stage of developing our own product portal, and it was interesting to see that some of our thoughts were echoed by reports from last weekâ€™s World Satellite Business Week event in Paris.

Unsurprisingly, speakers at the event agreed that the EO sector has huge growth potential. This is something we regularly see highlighted in various emails and press releases. For example, in the last few weeks weâ€™ve had:

At a few thousand dollars for access to each report, weâ€™ve said before that one of the products we should develop is an annual report on the EO market!

As weâ€™ve been working towards our portal, one of issues weâ€™ve identified is how difficult some portals are to navigate, particularly if you are not an EO expert. This was also recognised at the Paris event, with an acknowledgement that EO companies need to understand what customers want and then provide a user friendly experience to deliver those needs.

As reported by Tereza Pultarova in Space News, there was also discussion on the need to move away from simply selling data, and instead provide answers to the practical questions about the planet that businesses and consumers have. It is only through this transformation that new sectors and markets for EO will open which will be the key for the aforementioned future growth. The Paris event also highlighted some of the key trends that will be the backbone of this transformation:

Bringing satellite data together with social media information to rapidly enable context to be added to images.

Vertical integration within the industry within satellite firms acquiring with data processing and analytics companies; for example, Digital Globe acquired The Radiant Group earlier this year.

Processing data onboard satellites, so users download the information they want, rather than reams of data.

There was a really interesting analogy with the navigation industry given by Wade Larson, president and CEO of Urthecast. He said â€śNavigation became kind of embedded infrastructure in a much larger industry called location-based services. We think that this is happening with geoanalytics.â€ť

This evolution of the EO market needs to be recognised by every company in the industry from the Airbus down to the small companyâ€™s trying to launch their own product portal. If you donâ€™t move with the changing market, you wonâ€™t get any of the market.